Tclslides User's Manual
by Rildo Pragana <rpragana@acm.org>
Introduction
Tclslides is a program to allow several
machines follow a live presentation without any client-side program, except
for a Netscape or Mozilla browser with javascript enabled. On the server
side, a tcl script control the presentation, sending commands to show slides
or arbitrary images, text or html formatted files. It features also a simple
shell controlled at the server side, but viewable through all connected
clients. The full program is composed of two scripts, tclslides.cgi
, that must be installed as a regular cgi script under Apache or
other web server cgi-bin directory; and slides-srv
the main visual interface and command server for the former.
The Tclslides program is licensed under the
GPL (General Public License).
Installation
To install Tclslides, you have to put tclslides.cgi
in your web server cgi-bin directory and check the file permissions. That's
all! Client browsers will only have access to the slides or other documents
when the server program, slides-srv,
is running.
Each client will open a local connection from the cgi script to the
server program and will be added to the server's client list.
Main Window
Let us look at the main window of slides-srv to understand its elements:
|
fig1 - slides-srv main window
Starting at the bottom, we see an entry box with a url skeleton for
the image(s) or slide(s) we want to show. The string %C
will be replaced by the actual page or slide we are presenting. Below that
we have an entry at the left with the page number to show, besides several
buttons. We may edit the page number directly there, in the entry, or advance
forward by pressing the button labelled next . To go back one slide,
we may press the button labeled prev . In the event it is displaying
the wrong thing, or after we manually change the page, we press the reread
button. The remaining buttons are for showing what clients (browsers) are
connected to our server (button written show clients) or to change
the slide collection we are presenting now.
If you want to give it a try quickly, just edit the larger entry
(the url for the image, as we told before) and press the reread button.
Each browser connected to our cgi script will show the image url entered.
File Menu
The file menu
have the commands Open, New and Save, to manage text
or html files. There are also commands to seNd a regular non-marked-up
file to the clients, to send htMl formmated file and to start an
interactive sHell thall all clients will see. The last commands
are to add a bookmark, that will become available in the bookmarks menu,
if it isn't already there, and the exit command. When the program
is started for the first time, the bookmarks menu will be empty. Visit
some files and add a bookmark for each of them and the menu will grow.
Here is a sample bookmarks menu:
Edit menu
The edit menu have the usual cut,
copy and paste operations, besides a simple search function that is very
easy to use and have no fancy options. The slide-srv program also works
like a simple text editor, so we may add text to the text panel (the larger
area in the main window) and save the resulting text as a new document.
Beware the command File->New will clean up everything. Use File->Save
to save your new document.
Config menu
The config menu shows a
number lines checkbox. If this is checked, the text send will insert
line numbers before each text line. This is useful to present a source
listing (say a C program) refering to the lines. Then you may choose from
several alternative fonts for the text viewing in the control program.
This selection will not change nothing at he sent text. The Save Config
command may be used to make sure we don't lose our configuration, including
window position and size. This is not often needed, because the normal
exit of the program also saves the configuration parameters.
Here is a Netscape window with a remotelly controlled slide displayed: